Boxing

by Boddy, Kasia

• ISBN13: 9781861893697
• ISBN10: 1861893698
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-16
• Publisher: Reaktion Books

Summary

Boxing is one of the oldest and most exciting of sports: its bruising and bloody confrontations have permeated Western culture since 3000 BC. During that period, there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or naked fists to one other. Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all. In her encyclopaedic investigation, Kasia Boddy sheds new light on an elemental sports and struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Boddy examines the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, and shows how from Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics,Boxingexplores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, from cinema to radio to pay-per-view. The book also offers an intriguing new perspective on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding, Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin, Philip Roth, James Joyce, Mae West, Bertolt Brecht, and Charles Dickens. An all-encompassing study,Boxing ultimately reveals to us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

Author Biography

Kasia Boddy is lecturer in the Department of English at University College, London. She is also a contributor to American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique and Voyages and Visions.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 7
The Classical Golden Age	p. 9
The English Golden Age	p. 26
Pugilism and Style	p. 55
'Fighting, Rightly Understood'	p. 76
'Like Any Other Profession'	p. 110
Fresh Hopes	p. 166
Sport of the Future	p. 209
Save Me, Jack Dempsey; Save Me, Joe Louis	p. 257
King of the Hill, and Further Raging Bulls	p. 316
Conclusion	p. 367
References	p. 392
Select Bibliography	p. 456
Acknowledgements	p. 470
Photo Acknowledgements	p. 471
Index	p. 472
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.